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EELIGION AS 
APEE80NAI EXPERIENCE 



BY 



WILLIAM MILTON BRUNDAGE 




BOSTON 
AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 

1914 






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CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I Personal Religion i 

II Need of Religion 13 

III The Consecration 26 

IV The Service That Follows . . 41 
V The Assurance of Faith ... 55 

VI The Transfiguration of Life . 69 

VII Worshiping and Working To- 
gether 82 



PERSONAL RELIGION 



Religion as a Personal 
Experience 



PERSONAL RELIGION 

It is not at all unusual in our time to hear 
intelligent, cultivated, even highly trained 
people gravely discuss the place of re- 
ligion in modern life, as if it were an 
open question whether or not religion has 
as important a part to play in the future 
as it has played in the past; as if there 
can be anything in this world of supreme 
importance, apart from religion; as if re- 
ligion, personal religion, can mean any- 
thing less than fellowship with God, the 
Source and Ground of man's being. Re- 
ligion is not something artificial or ab- 
normal, something extraneous to be added 
on to an otherwise complete, well- 
rounded life. Religion is not something 
that a man may live without; rather is it 



2 Religion as a Personal Experience 

the natural, normal fulfillment of life it- 
self, life's blossoming out into perfect 
beauty and significance. It is the con- 
scious bringing of man's will into harmony 
with the will of God, with Good-Will, so 
that henceforth all discords cease, and the 
individual life makes music with the 
Whole. Religion means nothing at all 
that is worth while if it does not mean the 
personal commitment of the life to the 
service of high and holy ideals; if it does 
not mean salvation from the presence and 
power of evil; if it does not mean living 
in a divine universe, in sympathy and co- 
operation with one's human brothers. 

Such being the true nature of religion, 
no man can be said to live to any high and 
holy purpose, to appreciate what life in 
its fullness actually means, until he has ex- 
perienced religion, until he has found the 
living God for himself. Saint Augustine 
knew whereof he spake when, at the very 
beginning of his Confessions, he ex- 
claimed: *' O Lord, Thou awakest us to 
delight in Thy praise; for Thou madest 
us for Thyself, and our heart is restless 
until it repose in Thee." 

*' Thou madest us for Thyself." Man 
is made for religion, for conscious fellow- 



Personal Religion 3 

ship with God, and can never find repose, 
can never be at peace with himself, until 
this conscious union with God has been 
attained. From the very nature of the 
case, however, he must find God for him- 
self, he must experience religion for him- 
self. All that another can do is to point 
out the way, in the following of which 
the individual may thus find God. This 
is all that another can do. Religion is a 
personal matter between the individual 
and his God. 

It is, therefore, because they have never 
experienced religion for themselves that 
so many cultivated and highly-trained peo- 
ple of our time gravely discuss the place of 
religion in modern life as if it were an 
open question. They utterly fail to per- 
ceive the interior and personal nature of 
religion. They confuse religion with the 
institutions of religion, with the creeds 
and ritual of the churches. They do not 
distinguish the religion of authority from 
the religion of the spirit; trust in the God 
of whom one has heard from others, from 
trust in the God with whom one has be- 
come personally acquainted. 

Now what we describe as a hear-say 
religion may for a considerable time seem 



4 Religion as a Personal Experience 

to be adequate for the needs of life, seem 
to perform the functions of personal re- 
ligion. But its fatal defect lies in the fact 
that it can not successfully endure the test 
of life's serious experiences. It can not 
be relied upon just when it is most needed. 
It is a house built upon the sand; when 
the storm beats upon it, it falls. 

It is a matter of common observation 
that so long as our lives are without grave 
trials, so long as our friends and loved 
ones are spared to us, so long as the sky 
is clear and radiant, the birds sing in the 
branches of the trees, the flowers blossom 
beside our path, so long as prosperity 
smiles upon us, we get along very well 
with a hear-say religion, a religion ac- 
cepted upon authority. For a time we 
may fail to seriously miss anything out of 
our life. Indeed we are ready to resent 
it if any person questions us, no matter 
how kindly, concerning the basis of our 
religious faith. 

Believe in God? Most certainly we 
do. Only the fool ** hath said in his 
heart. There is no God." Pray? Of 
course we pray; we pray the prayers our 
mothers taught us to pray. Our mother's 
religion is good enough for us. We at- 



Personal Religion 5 

tend church with greater or less regularity. 
We give ready assent to the most elab- 
orate creeds. Such staunch defenders, 
are we, of the powers that be in church 
and state, that we join in the denuncia- 
tion of all heretics and unbelievers and 
traitors. We live respectable lives. Not 
in any sense are we hypocrites. In so far 
as we have given our beliefs any thought, 
our intellect has approved, even though 
our heart has never been touched. 

Thus we fondly dream, in this the time 
of our health and prosperity, that we can 
always live contentedly upon the religion 
of authority, a religion that we have never 
made our own by personal experience. 
The tragedy of it all is too deep for words. 

For into our life some day sorrow bursts 
like a flood. Our good health fails us; 
we are afflicted with a grave disease. 
Hitherto we have never known what phys- 
ical weakness and pain mean; we are dis- 
mayed now that we experience them for 
the first time. Health gone, our very 
livelihood is imperiled. As our hard- 
earned savings slowly melt away, we are 
threatened with dire poverty, actual want. 

Or it may be that friends in whom 
we trusted have failed us, have turned 



6 Religion as a Personal Experience 

against us and are seeking to injure us, — 
our trusted friends ! Stunned, bewildered, 
we do not know in whom we can trust. 
Whereas formerly all men spoke well of 
us, we are now misunderstood, misrepre- 
sented, grievously maligned. It seems as 
if enemies rise up against us on every side. 

Or it may be that under the stress of 
temptation, we have committed an evil 
deed, a cowardly, a dastardly deed. We 
have violated no outward law, it may be, 
but we know that we have sinned ; our con- 
sciences condemn us. We are ashamed; 
we are troubled by remorse. 

Or it may be that our sheltered home 
is invaded by death; our beloved is 
stricken down at our side. We are dumb 
with anguish. All our proud self-suf- 
ficiency crumbles into dust. The skies 
have become inky black ; the birds have 
hushed their songs; the light of our life 
has been extinguished. 

Where now is our religion, the religious 
faith we once professed to hold, the faith 
in which at one time we had actually per- 
suaded ourselves that we confidently 
trusted, the religion that had come down 
to us as a part of our heredity from the 
past, the religion that had been accepted 



Personal Religion 7 

upon mere authority, or through the per- 
suasion of our parents and friends, or 
through the books we had read, or the 
sermons we had heard preached? The 
old arguments listened to so often in the 
home or in the church, grown familiar to 
us in the pages of our favorite authors, 
seem to have lost their force, and con- 
vince no longer. 

Pray? Alas, to whom can we pray? 
We have not forgotten the prayers we 
learned at our mother's knees, but we can 
not pray them as our mother prayed them. 
We have lost our mother's God; or we 
see now that we never knew Him. All 
our life long we have heard about Him, 
and foolishly believed that we knew Him. 
Grave doubts for which we were wholly 
unprepared sweep over and engulf us. 
We are not sure any longer that there is 
a God or, at' least, a God whom we can 
trust. What if the testimony ©f parents 
and friends, of poets and saints, aye, and 
even the testimony of the Bible itself prove 
to be all a mistake? What if, after all, 
the insistent apostles of unbelief in the an- 
cient and modern world, at whose violent 
diatribes in our happy prosperous days 
we have been wont to derisively smile, 



8 Religton as a Personal Experience 

prove to be in the right? What if after 
critical investigation the good Master of 
Nazareth turns out to be but a self-deluded 
enthusiast, and His personal trust in the 
Heavenly Father to be but an empty 
dream? What if the Great Companion 
be dead, as poor Clifford affirms? What 
If there be no enduring Spiritual Reality 
in and behind the universe? 

Is there anything left to us that is actu- 
ally worth while ? Are there any Eternal 
Values? Upon what, upon whom, can our 
troubled, restless, agonized soul repose? 

Let no reader for a moment complain 
that the author is dealing with merely 
hypothetical cases, and not with actual 
human experiences. Through a long min- 
istry he has become personally acquainted 
with men and women who have suffered 
in just the ways described. And such a 
possible catastrophe ever waits upon a 
mere formal, conventional religion, a re- 
ligion accepted upon the testimony of 
another but never experienced by the in- 
dividual himself, whenever life's real 
crises arise. When the test which can not 
be evaded comes, personal religion, spir- 
itual fellowship with God, supreme trust 
in the Eternal Values that has been won, 



Personal Religion 9 

alone can sustain hope, courage and even 
sanity itself. Nothing else in such an hour 
can possibly avail. *' O Lord, Thou 
madest us for Thyself, and our heart is 
restless until it repose in Thee." 

Do you not see that it is because of 
man's divine origin, because man is a free 
spirit, a child of the good God, that he 
can not be satisfied, that he can not be at 
rest, until he enters upon his rightful in- 
heritance, until he becomes spiritually 
united to God? And he must find God 
for himself. Again we must remember 
that all that one man can do for another, 
all that father and mother can do for their 
child, all that the best-beloved can do for 
his friend, all that the great religious 
teachers and leaders of the world can do, 
all that the good Master can do for any 
free man is to help to awaken within him 
the desire to be at one with God, and to 
point out the way to God. That way, 
however long or short it may be, how- 
ever difficult or easy, must be trod by the 
individual himself. In no other manner 
can man enter into life, into fullness of 
life. 

Certainly the process of finding God, of 
experiencing religion Is not one and the 



lo Religion as a Personal Experience 

same for all men ; it is as varied as human 
nature itself. For many persons it is a 
gradual process, covering, it may be, a 
series of years, so quiet and orderly as to 
be unmarked by any apparent crises; while 
for others it may be sudden and striking, 
and the critical experience burst upon one 
like a flash of lightning out of the en- 
veloping darkness. In most cases the 
stages of the process are distinct and easy 
to be traced, step by step. In any event, 
whether the process be gradual or sudden, 
the end attained, the goal reached, is one 
and the same for all, whether Jew or 
Gentile, orthodox or heretic, young or old, 
ignorant or learned, rich or poor, of 
humble station or of exalted rank, whether 
possessed of rare gifts or of but a single 
talent. 

The one who has attained has reached 
the goal, has entered into fellowship with 
God, has actually experienced religion, will 
be conscious of the fact. There will be 
no uncertainty, no serious doubt about it. 
He can and ought to know in whom he has 
believed. Is not this what one would 
naturally expect in a world that is intelli- 
gible, rational? If I am a child of God 
I ought to know it. The child ought to 



Personal Religion li 

be able to find his Father, and to commune 
with Him; and when he has found Him 
and become reconciled to Him, the child 
ought to be aware of the fact, ought to be 
assured of his divine relationship. It is 
perfectly reasonable to urge such a claim. 
The experience of humanity justifies it. 

It will be the purpose of the author in 
the chapters that follow to describe in the 
simplest terms what he believes constitutes 
a genuine religious experience, and how it 
can be attained. What he will try to de- 
scribe is an experience that has been real- 
ized by men and women of all religious 
bodies throughout Christendom, and by 
numerous persons outside of all forms of 
organized religion. He will seek to avoid 
matters of sectarian controversy, insisting 
only upon what is common to all. He will 
attempt no elaborate argument. Spiritual 
facts, and not theoretical arguments, are 
most effective in the consideration of such 
a theme. While he will seek to be un- 
technical in the language employed, he will 
freely make use of terms filled with the as- 
sociations of the past, whenever he can 
make clear the sense in which he uses 
them. What is said will be in the nature 
of a confession of faith. The appeal will 



12 Religion as a Personal Experience 

be to the underlying experience of serious, 
spiritually-minded men and women. 

The author has entered upon this un- 
dertaking because he verily believes that 
a personal experience of religion is of in- 
finitely more value than any other posses- 
sion; that life is not worth living without 
it; that human society can be redeemed 
only through the service of those who 
possess it. 



II 

NEED OF RELIGION 



II 

NEED OF RELIGION 

Natural and normal as is an experience 
of religion, no man can attain it until he 
has first felt the supreme need of it. An 
experience of religion must verily present 
itself to him as the only possible fulfill- 
ment of life; as a treasure to be searched 
for with all diligence; as a pearl of great 
price to be acquired at whatever sacrifice. 
The growing man must reach a stage in 
his development at which he can not be 
satisfied without reconciliation to God, 
without coming into harmony with his 
highest and holiest moral ideals. He 
must at last solemnly resolve to search for 
God with all his heart, soul, mind and 
strength, search until he find Him. 

The breaking up of the ordinary man's 
hitherto thoughtless, easy-going content 
which issues in such a resolve comes sooner 
or later to all healthy-minded, normal men 
and women. We say to all normal men 
and women, and we mean just this; for 

X3 



14 Religion as a Personal Experience 

we can not consider as responsible human 
beings abnormal, defective, exceptional 
individuals to whom it may never come. 
Such exceptional cases do not invalidate 
the truth of the great law of human life; 
'' Man can not live by bread alone, but by 
every word that proceedeth out of the 
mouth of God." Man can not live as 
the lower creatures about him, for in him 
have been created a hunger and a thirst 
which no material food and drink can 
satisfy. He has discovered for himself 
that his '* life consisteth not in the abun- 
dance of the things which he possesseth " ; 
he has learned that in these words the 
Master of the good life gave expression 
not only to the experience of his own race, 
but to the experience of mankind. Read 
the biographies of the world's greatest 
men, the prophets of Israel, the sages of 
India and the Far East, the wise men of 
Greece and Rome, the foremost philoso- 
phers and poets of modern Europe and 
America, and discover for yourself how 
well-nigh universal is this divine discon- 
tent with mere things; this frank recogni- 
tion of the need of spiritual realities; this 
profound conviction that nothing but re- 
ligion can satisfy the human soul. 



Need of Religion 15 

Physical comforts such as adequate food 
and drink and shelter are not to be ignored 
and despised; but these at their best are 
utterly inadequate to satisfy the needs of 
a man. Man must have bread, but he 
must have much besides. He must have 
books as well as bread. He must have 
pictures, sculpture, music and other means 
for the satisfaction of his higher nature. 
But even then the normal, fully-devel- 
oped man, the man who has grown a soul, 
is not content. His moral and spiritual 
nature must be satisfied; his aspirations 
after Truth and Beauty are not more in- 
sistent than his aspirations after the Good. 
And more than this; just as certainly as 
he needs the society of friends and human 
sympathy does he need the friendship and 
sympathy of the Great Companion, the 
Heavenly Father. Apart from His com- 
panionship, without conscious fellowship 
with Him, he can not live to any high and 
worthy purpose. Until he has made the 
Eternal Good-Will the law of his personal 
life he has not begun to live as a man. 

Or let us approach this human need in 
another way. Life has well been de- 
scribed as the adjustment of the individual 
organism to its environment, *' the con- 



1 6 Religion as a Personal Experience 

tinuous adjustment of internal relations 
to external relations." The cessation of 
such adjustment means death, while the 
more perfect the adjustment, the more 
complete and abundant the life. For such 
perfect adjustment, for just such complete 
and abunda;it life, every living creature is 
seeking. Throughout the entire creation 
one prayer, conscious or unconscious, is 
rising to the Source of all life for more of 
life. 

The environment of the lower crea- 
tures, of plants and of animals, is physical. 
Man, too, on his animal side, seeks adjust- 
ment to his physical environment. But 
even the most perfect physical adjustment 
does not satisfy him. He has become con- 
scious of another environment. There are 
influences all about him, events in his daily 
life, the play upon him of forces from the 
unseen world, intimations of higher, spir- 
itual values which are continually making 
him dissatisfied with even the completest 
adjustment to his physical environment. 
He is forever conscious of failure to make 
perfect his adjustment. ** What lack I 
yet?" 

Not a day passes but that with greater 
or less insistence he puts to himself, if not 



Need of Religion 17 

to another, this question which the young 
ruler put to Jesus. The very sense of 
physical satiety impels him to seek else- 
where for real and abiding sources of con- 
tent. Sooner or later he discovers that 
the words of James Russell Lowell are 
literally true: 

" Man can not be God's outlaw if he would, 
Nor so abscond him in the caves of sense 
But Nature still shall search some crevice out 
With messages of splendor from that Source 
Which, dive he, soar he, baffles still and lures." 

That Source is the Living God. 

Neither caves of sense nor caves of the 
mere intellect can satisfy him. He may 
seek to acquire the widest and most com- 
prehensive knowledge. In the exercise of 
his critical reason he may derive the great- 
est satisfaction. But when he peers down 
deep below the surface, he very soon per- 
ceives that the universe includes vastly 
more than his critical reason is able to 
subsume under its most elaborate cate- 
gories. To properly adjust himself to the 
spiritual universe he discovers that he has 
developed a reason, practical as well as 
critical, which he must trust as a part of 
his divine inheritance. Behind and be- 



1 8 Religion as a Personal Experience 

yond his logical understanding is a cate- 
gorical imperative that commands him to 
do not only what is pleasing and profitable, 
not only what is gratifying to appetite 
and passion, but what is righteous and 
generous and kind; that commands him to 
give as well as get, to serve as well as be 
served. 

Sooner or later he becomes aware of a 
scale of values within him by which he 
must pronounce judgment upon all his ac- 
tions. For his actions are different from 
one another not only in the quantity of 
pleasure they bring; they differ from one 
another in quality as well as in quantity. 
It is somehow worthier and better, infi- 
nitely worthier and better, to be just than 
to be unjust, no matter what the immediate 
consequences may be; it is worthier and 
better to be true than to be false, to be 
brave than to be a coward, to be gentle 
and affectionate than to be cruel and hate- 
ful. His conception of these higher 
values may be crude and defective, but the 
inward command to act in harmony with 
these higher values can not be ignored nor 
misunderstood. He can not be persuaded 
that his higher inspirations stand unre- 
lated to some external Reality; that they 



Need of Religion 19 

arise within him simply to be thwarted. 
For the time he may stifle them; for the 
time they may seem to be altogether 
smothered: but they will persist in most 
unexpectedly reappearing and reasserting 
themselves to confound him. Hunger and 
thirst after righteousness he must and will 
because it is his nature to become right- 
eous. *^ O Lord, Thou madest us for 
Thyself, and our heart is restless until it 
repose in Thee." Because he is spirit, 
he must adjust himself to the Eternal 
Spirit. 

Ay, the need of religion is in the heart 
of every one of us, the need of help in our 
weakness, of comfort in our loneliness and 
sorrow, a clue to the mystery that en- 
velops us, 

"the guiding thread so fine 
Along the mighty labyrinth." 

It is not necessary for any one to prove 
it to us, to appeal to the past, to recount 
the confessions of men and women of all 
nations and of all times. We have only 
to appeal to the men and women all about 
us, no matter how worldly-wise and so- 
phisticated they may be, no matter how 
preoccupied and absorbed their lives, no 



20 Religion as a Personal Experience 

matter how deeply they may have buried 
themselves in the pursuit of gain, in the 
accumulation of mere material goods. 

Once at least in every twenty-four hours 
the most active and preoccupied of us all 
must stand face to face with our neglected 
ideals, the ideals of childhood and early 
manhood or womanhood: "Commune 
with your own heart upon your bed, and 
be still." Voices will persist in coming to 
us in the night when all the noises of the 
day have been stilled. We may escape 
from these voices in the hours of feverish 
activity, but in the quiet of our own cham- 
ber we must commune with them. 

To drown these Insistent voices we may 
resort to wild excesses, drink ourselves 
Into insensibility; the distraction will be 
but transient. Sooner or later will come 
the awakening; the masks will be torn off; 
and the real self against which we have 
offended, the God against whom we have 
sinned, will confront us as we are. The 
proudest, most arrogant, most self-suffi- 
cient among us can not escape the humbling 
of his pride, the exposure of his weakness. 
It Is only the abnormal and not wholly sane 
who, while In rebellion against God, con- 
sciously shut off from the source of spir- 



Need of Religion 21 

itual power, will not in the hour of self- 
revelation confess that they are as desti- 
tute of power for the noblest ends of life 
as the machine detached from the dynamo. 

With greater or less clearness, then, a 
sense of the urgent necessity of religion, 
of union with God, is awakened within 
man just as soon as he becomes a man. 
This vivid sense of personal need, this 
first step towards the religious life, is 
called by different names. Our fathers 
were wont to call it ^* The Spirit's awaken- 
ing and convicting of sin." Are there any 
simpler, clearer and better terms by which 
to describe the experience? 

Sin means missing the mark, failing to 
attain the Good conceived as the goal of 
human activity. The failure may consist 
of the choosing of a lower in the presence 
of a higher good. The unthinking grati- 
fication of appetite in a beast is perfectly 
innocent, while in a human being it is a 
sin. There is nothing wrong in the display 
of ugliness in a bull thwarted in its pur- 
pose; in man ugliness is a sin. Jealousy 
among the cocks of a barnyard is amusing; 
to yield to jealousy among men is a sin. 
For the young cuckoo to ruthlessly crowd 
its foster-brothers out of the nest to starve, 



22 Religion as a Personal Experience 

in order that it may enjoy exclusively the 
protection and support of the foster par- 
ents is to follow the only instinct it knows ; 
while for a human being to act in a similar 
manner would be to violate higher in- 
stincts and to sin. 

The conviction of sin is the conscious- 
ness that one has violated his nobler na- 
ture, has chosen a lower in the presence 
of a higher good, has missed the mark at 
which he aimed. A conviction of sin al- 
ways implies that a higher and ideal good 
has been conceived; that good not having 
been attained, a sense of unworthiness has 
been awakened. This conviction of per- 
sonal unworthiness, of actual lawlessness 
against the divine order is a step towards 
an experience of religion; is indeed posi- 
tive evidence that the individual has grown 
a soul. It is the experience of every 
prodigal son when he comes to himself, to 
his higher and worthier self, and begins 
to realize for the first time what a great 
mistake he made when he left his father's 
house to journey into ** the far counti'y " 
of sin. In that far country he is perish- 
ing with hunger, while at home there is 
bread enough and to spare. But he can 
not turn his face homeward until he has 



Need of Religion 23 

been awakened to appreciate his folly, un- 
til he has come to his better self. 

Although they may differ widely in their 
description of this awakening of the soul, 
all religious teachers agree in recognizing 
the fact. This life of ours is one and 
the same, wherever and whenever lived, 
whether in ancient Palestine, or in Puritan 
England, or in modern America. Strictly 
speaking there are not different kinds of 
human nature; neither, strictly speaking, 
are there different kinds of religion, of 
personal religion. There is but one re- 
ligion known to us under different names, 
inasmuch as there is but one God and 
Father of men, though He may be wor- 
shiped under different names. 

Just as soon as this divine awakening 
of the human soul has been attained, just 
as soon as the conviction of sin has become 
a personal realization, every earnest man 
must share the profound self-reproach of 
Saint Paul, *' O wretched man that I am! 
who shall deliver me from this body of 
death?" 

The utterance of such a cry is far from 
being an indication of the sufferer's weak- 
ness and pusillanimity, as has been claimed; 
rather is it an indication of weakness and 



24 Religion as a Personal Experience 

pusillanimity to seek to stifle the convic- 
tion which has provoked such a cry, to 
seek to restrain the passionate yearnings 
after forgiveness and newness of life, to 
seek to repress the prayer for victory over 
the lower self, for real union with God. 
Whenever men have thus sought to stifle 
their convictions, to harden their hearts 
against repentance, to persist in starving 
their spiritual nature, they have but made 
plain to all about them their own reckless 
folly, their own pitiful immaturity. They 
are but foolish, headstrong children who 
must be set to learn life's lesson all over 
again. Once more they must be taught 
by pain and disappointment and sorrow. 
Poor, half-starved, imperfectly developed 
human creatures, they stagger across this 
stage of human life, and go out into the 
future world without ever having begun 
to live in this. But go where they may, 
they can not escape from the Eternal God 
who ever suffers with them, suffers to re- 
deem them. The foolish hardening proc- 
ess in which they are engaged can not en- 
dure forever; their rejection of the good 
life can not be final and absolute. 

To every man who shares Paul's cry of 
agony, *' O wretched man that I am ! who 



Need of Religion 25 

shall deliver me from this body of death? " 
and who sincerely seeks for deliverance, 
deliverance will come. In the very real- 
ization of the need, in the very agony of 
repentance, will come to the obedient man 
the vision of possible deliverance: ''I 
thank God through Jesus Christ our 
Lord." Deliverance from this body of 
death, emancipation from bondage to the 
lower self of animal ancestry with its 
clamorous appetites and passions, with its 
boundless egotism, its cruelty and heart- 
less greed is possible in one way, and in 
but one way, the way of self-sacrifice, of 
renunciation, of obedient love, the very 
way in which Jesus Christ trod. 

Through the moral force of His life, 
a life the type of all heroic self-sacrifice, 
and through such moral force alone, can 
the real man, the higher spiritual self 
within every one of us, win a final victory, 
enter into union with the living God, at- 
tain what we mean by an experience of per- 
sonal religion. 



Ill 

THE CONSECRATION 



Ill 

THE CONSECRATION 

** If any man will come after me, let him 
deny himself, take up his cross and fol- 
low me." These words of the Master of 
the good life, reported in all three Syn- 
optic Gospels, clearly point out the way 
by the following of which every man may 
find God for himself, point out the only 
way by which a man can be delivered from 
*^ this body of death." Aroused from 
his thoughtless, easy-going content, fully 
awake at last to a sense of personal need, 
sincerely penitent for the wrongdoing of 
the past, and turning resolutely away from 
such wrongdoing, he must in the very spirit 
of the good Master consecrate himself 
to God, solemnly dedicate himself to the 
service of God and of man. 

Hitherto he has been living a self-cen- 
tered life, devoted to the lower self which 
isolates, which separates him from God 
and from his fellows. He must sacrifice 

26 



The Consecration 27 

this lower divisive self, in the interests of 
his higher spiritual self, the self which 
loves and serves. And lo! his very self- 
surrender constitutes his complete self- 
realization, for ** Die to live " is the law 
of the universe. 

It is perfectly true that man ought never 
to have become consciously separate from 
God; he ought never to have left his 
Father's house. His parents and teachers 
ought to have so lived out their religion 
before him, to have so impressed upon his 
growing mind and heart the supreme im- 
portance of religion, to have so wisely and 
patiently encouraged and helped to de- 
velop within him a personal religious life, 
that he should never remember the time 
when he did not love and trust God, when 
God's good-will was not the law of his 
life, when it was not his highest joy to serve 
his fellow men. He ought never to have 
made the adventure into ^' the far coun- 
try"; he ought always to have remained 
at home in his Father's house. The 
experience of Edward Everett Hale ought 
not to be an uncommon one. 

** I always knew that God loved me, and 
was always grateful to Him for the 
world He placed me in. I always liked 



28 Religion as a Personal Experience 

to tell Him so, and was always glad to 
receive His suggestions to me." 

Dr. Hale does not claim that he always 
did what was right, always acted up to 
the best he knew, always served his fel- 
low men with disinterested devotion. But 
from his earliest recollection he was never 
conscious of any serious alienation from 
his Heavenly Father. " I was always 
glad to receive His suggestions to me." 
So ought every human child to feel. It 
is his divine birthright. 

The most of us, however, never thus 
learned as little children to delight to do 
the Father's good-will, or if we learned 
it, we soon forgot the lesson. If the ex- 
perience has come to us at all as a per- 
manent possession, it has come to us in 
maturer years only after we have returned 
from " the far country " into which we had 
strayed. It came when we made the 
supreme commitment of our life to God, 
when heartily sorry for all our self-wor- 
ship and self-seeking, we cast ourselves 
upon our knees before our Father and 
poured out into His ear all the story of 
how we had yielded ourselves to appetite 
and passion, to pride, falsehood and greed. 

Up to that moment of consecration we 



The Consecration 29 

had not always been glad to receive God's 
suggestions to us, though we may have 
tried hard to persuade ourselves that we 
were. We followed too much '' the de- 
vices and desires of our own hearts." 
We preferred to choose our own way and 
were resentful if we were ever thwarted 
in prosecuting it. We were jealous and 
rebellious if others seemed to be more 
highly favored by fortune than we. This 
does not mean that we deliberately fought 
against God, were consciously hostile to 
the Good. Often we tried to follow what 
we knew to be the better way. Again 
and again we longed to be just and kind 
and true, but temptation proved too pow- 
erful for us to resist. When at critical 
moments we halted between two conflict- 
ing opinions, too often the less worthy 
opinion, the ignoble selfish motive won the 
victory. Our life was never of a single 
piece; in the weaving of it we followed no 
one consistent pattern, never actually 
willed to follow one consistent pattern. 

But henceforth, in so far as we can make 
it, our life shall be of a single piece. 
Henceforth what God wills, we will. As 
the good Master taught us, with perfect 
whole-heartedness, with simple abandon, 



30 Religion as a Personal Experience 

we devote ourselves to the service of 
others. Henceforth we shall find our 
chief joy in making those about us happy. 
We deliberately burn our bridges behind 
us, for, God helping us, we shall not re- 
turn the way we came. Our fondly cher- 
ished idols are shattered, everything we 
foolishly loved better than God's good- 
will. Humbled is all our pride and vain- 
glory. All hatred and ill will, all unworthy 
compromises with falsehood and cowardly 
love of ease, all pursuit of unjust gain are 
abandoned. 

Henceforth the one question that shall 
concern us will be, not what and how much 
can I get, but what and how much can I 
give ; not how can I be best served, but how 
can I best serve? Are there any difficult 
and dangerous tasks to be performed, 
** Here am I; send me." At last I have 
made the supreme choice, have embarked 
upon the divine adventure. At whatever 
cost, with singleness of purpose, I shall try 
to be brave and pure and true and just and 
good. This is what we mean by conse- 
cration. 

No persuasions of others even the most 
impassioned and eloquent can effect this 
radical change in the trend of a man's life, 



The Consecration 31 

this self-surrender and self-dedication to a 
holy cause ; others may encourage and help 
the individual to make it, but that is all 
that they can do. No change, nor even 
transformation in a man's material en- 
vironment, though it may help, can effect 
this radical change in the man's spirit. 
No mere intellectual acquirements, no 
mere increase of knowledge can effect it. 
Unqualified assent to all the creeds of the 
world can not effect it,, nor can the most 
rigid observance of the most elaborate 
ritual of worship. 

God alone, the Immanent Spirit work- 
ing in man's conscience, through man's af- 
fections and will, can effect it. Because 
man is a child of God, life of His Life, 
spirit of His Spirit, 

** When duty whispers low, Thou must, 
The youth replies, I can." 

It is never the youth apart from God 
who says I can ; it is the youth at one with 
God. '' Work out your own salvation 
with fear and trembling, for it is God that 
worketh in you both to will and to do of 
His own good pleasure." It is the higher, 
diviner self, never apart from God, which 
wins the victory of the spirit. 



32 Religion as a Personal Experience 

Let no man deceive himself in this mat- 
ter and suppose that he can ever know 
what personal, spiritual religion actually 
means until he has made this supreme com- 
mitment of his life to God, this perfect 
dedication of intellect, affections and will 
to the highest and holiest and best he 
knows. On this point all the world's 
greatest religious teachers are perfectly 
agreed. What they call the highest and 
holiest and best they can conceive does not 
greatly matter, whether Allah, Jehovah, 
Ahura Mazda, God, Eternal Righteous- 
ness, Spiritual Reality, or that name which 
seems to us the most tender, and satisfying, 
and profoundly true, *' Our Father"; 
what supremely matters is the personal 
dedication. By whatever symbol we rep- 
resent Him to whom we are dedicated. He 
is the Father of us all, the Source and 
Ground of all being, the one Infinite and 
Eternal God. 

All religious men recognize one another 
as brethren, in the last analysis, simply and 
solely by the fact that they share in this 
supreme consecration. Perhaps never be- 
fore had this fact been so conspicuously 
recognized as at the great Parliament of 
Religions held in Chicago in the year 1893. 



The Consecration 33 

The sessions of this parliament which 
brought together representatives of all the 
important religions of the world were 
opened by the words of the Lord's Prayer 
recited in unison, '' Our Father who art in 
Heaven. '^ And all who understood Eng- 
lish joined in the singing of the hymn, 
*^ Nearer, my God, to Thee." It was a 
sublime occasion, unparalleled in human 
history, never possible until our own age 
of growing toleration and widening human 
sympathy. 

This was the positive teaching of that 
great parliament: Whatever be your na- 
tionality, whatever be your race, whether 
rich or poor, whether of humble rank or 
of exalted station, whether ignorant or 
learned, there is but one way by which you 
can experience religion; you must be recon- 
ciled to your God, come into personal fel- 
lowship with Him, come into perfect ac- 
cord with your ideal Good. So long as 
you are selfish and self-seeking you can not 
know what personal religion means. But 
if you are consecrated to God, and are liv- 
ing the life of consecration, you have en- 
tered into the Communion of Saints, what- 
ever be your particular church communion; 
you have become a new creature; you 



34 Religion as a Personal Experience 

'* have changed your market cart into a 
chariot of the sun " ; you have passed from 
death, spiritual death, unto eternal life. 

And there is no doubt or uncertainty in 
the mind of any person as to whether or not 
he has made this supreme consecration. 
The experience stands out with startling 
distinctness in the field of consciousness. 
Certainly this supreme commitment of 
one's life to God is not all that an experi- 
ence of religion means, but it is an essen- 
tial part of it, and brings its own proper 
attestation. I may pray day after day, 
and year after year this petition of the 
Lord's Prayer, ** Thy will be done on earth 
as it is done in Heaven," and try to enter 
into the spirit of the words, and actually 
persuade myself for a time that I mean 
just what the words express. But when 
at last I do come to mean it, come to 
vividly comprehend what the words im- 
ply and all that they imply, I discover that 
I never prayed the prayer before; that 
never before have I actually known what 
it means to say, " Thy will be done." 

The author can never forget the first 
time he actually prayed this prayer. It 
was in a dimly lighted college chapel, on 
a cold, bleak October day. A drizzling 



The Consecration 35 

rain was falling without, so that the at- 
mosphere of the chapel was exceedingly 
depressing. The students, most of them 
present under compulsion, were prepared 
for a dreary hour. There did not 
promise to be anything very inspiring and 
uplifting in the service ; not even the sing- 
ing was as spirited as usual. And when 
the preacher announced his text, it proved 
to be the familiar, even hackneyed ques- 
tion of the Roman Jailer to Paul and Silas, 
'* Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" 
What does it mean to be saved, not simply 
from the penalty of sin but from the pres- 
ence and power of sin? Salvation is an 
ethical process, a radical change from a 
self-centered life to a God-centered life, 
from devotion to self to devotion to 
others. The treatment of the text was re- 
markably fresh and suggestive, and one 
hearer at least in that chapel audience 
found himself from the very beginning 
listening to the speaker with eager interest, 
listening as though the message were ad- 
dressed to his own soul. And to his soul 
it was addressed. He forgot all about the 
time and place ; the sermon gripped him as 
in a vise. He was stirred to the depths 
of his being; his conscience was thoroughly 



36 Religion as a Personal Experience 

aroused. If that is what salvation means, 
he knew very well that he had never been 
saved. 

Like so many others he had joined the 
church as a child; without question he had 
accepted the creed of his church, and sup- 
posed that he was a Christian. For the 
past seven years he had, with varying de- 
grees of success, tried to live the good life. 
Most of the ordinary vulgar forms of vice 
were, by reason of his early training, un- 
attractive to him; his temptation did not 
come from them. But self-centered he 
was, passionately ambitious to carry out his 
own selfish plans, at whatever cost, to at- 
tain his own personal ends. 

His father had been a devoted minister 
of religion, and just before he died had 
called his young son to his bedside and 
earnestly prayed that when the son grew 
to manhood, he might take up and carry 
on his father's tragically interrupted work. 
The son loved and honored his father, but 
child as he was, he could not and would not 
seriously consider the work of a minister 
of religion. He thought that he was too 
well acquainted with the sacrifices that 
such a life-work involved. He rebelled 
against the very thought of entering upon 



The Consecration 37 

it. His tastes did not incline him to it, 
while his ambition pointed in a very differ- 
ent direction. It could not be God's will 
that he should be called upon to make the 
sacrifices that his father had made. He 
would try to be a good man, but he could 
serve the world better, and with much more 
pleasure and profit to himself, in some 
other way. And thus he sought to dismiss 
the matter, and plunged into his studies 
with feverish intensity, and as far as lay 
within his power prepared for his chosen 
calling. 

That afternoon in the college chapel was 
the crisis of his life, and in a vague way 
he was conscious of it. He had long been 
restless, uneasy, dissatisfied with himself. 
At last he stood at the parting of the ways. 
Under the influence of the preacher it 
seemed as if all the wretched sophistries 
by which he had been trying to evade the 
plain issue, were ruthlessly brushed aside. 
This was the question that he must then 
and there decide : should he, or should he 
not at last do what he knew he ought, re- 
nounce his selfish ambitions, relinquish, if 
need be, his fondly cherished hopes and 
plans for the future, commit his life wholly 
unto God, and from henceforth follow in 



38 Religion as a Personal Experience 

the path in which God might lead? 
Should he persist in living for self or 
should he begin to live for others? If he 
became persuaded that God called him to 
be a minister of religion, was he willing 
to enter upon even so difficult a task? 

While the preacher was still a long way 
from the end of his sermon, he bowed his 
head upon the back of the seat before him, 
and for the first time in his life prayed in 
perfect sincerity the Lord's Prayer, '* Thy 
will be done." What the good God wills 
concerning my life, I will. I can live no 
longer in conflict with my conscience, for 
life is not worth living on such terms. 
" Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do? " 

In that quiet hour the struggle of years 
was ended. His awakened spiritual na- 
ture had come to feel the need of perfect 
union with God. There and then he made 
the supreme self-surrender, and conse- 
crated his life to God. As far as he knew 
he kept nothing back, made no reserva- 
tion. His highest and holiest ideal had 
proved stronger than his personal inclina- 
tion and ambition. And he found God 
for himself. A great calm pervaded his 
entire being. He felt as the prophet 
Isaiah when the live coal from the altar 



The Consecration 39 

touched his lips; '* Lord, here am I; 
send me." Send me on any difficult er- 
rand that may seem wise to Thee. What 
before seemed impossible has become a 
privilege. 

The congregation was dismissed, and 
he went out into the storm. But the 
gloom that had depressed him had van- 
ished, and ^' a great light shone round 
about him." In spite of the storm the 
trees of the college campus had never be- 
fore seemed one half so beautiful. It was 
a transformed world, a wonderfully fresh 
new world into which he had entered. 

Those about him cleverly criticised the 
sermon of the afternoon, as college stu- 
dents will. He felt no resentment, but 
only an amazed and tender pity. Why 
could they not see what that sermon had 
meant to him, and what it might have 
meant to them? They appeared utterly 
unmoved by what had effected nothing 
short of a revolution in his personal life. 

Since that day in the college chapel his 
convictions concerning many things have 
been greatly modified. Many of the be- 
liefs he then held he holds no longer. But 
from that day to this he has never once 
questioned the reality of what he then ex- 



40 Religion as a Personal Experience 

perlenced; he has never for any length of 
time lost faith in the God to whom he 
there and then dedicated his life. 

Something like this, then, is what is 
meant by a consecration, a dedication of 
one's life to God. We modern men and 
women do not and can not think of the 
Eternal God in the same way; we do not 
and can not describe religion in the same 
terms. But in some God, some Supreme 
Intelligence, some " Power not ourselves 
that makes for righteousness," some Good- 
Will at the heart of things we must believe, 
and to that Supreme Good-Will we must 
dedicate our lives. For all time and at 
any cost, we must break with our old self- 
centered lives, and devote ourselves to the 
cause of righteousness and human brother- 
hood. Only as we make the supreme ven- 
ture of faith, do we discover a sure founda- 
tion beneath our feet. 

And there is no other way whereby we 
can be saved. '' If any man will come 
after me let him deny himself, take up his 
cross and follow me." 



IV 
THE SERVICE THAT FOLLOWS 



IV 

THE SERVICE THAT FOLLOWS 

If the personal consecration, the supreme 
commitment of one's self to God, has been 
made with clear intelligence and with per- 
fect sincerity of heart, the devoted service 
of one's fellow men, an active life of truth, 
righteousness and good-will, naturally and 
inevitably follows. The peace, the in- 
ward approval that comes to a man when 
the conflict between his lower self and his 
higher, spiritual self is ended by the vic- 
tory of the higher, is but a foretaste of 
the fuller, richer and abiding joy experi- 
enced when he actually begins to do the 
Father's will, actually begins to live the 
good life. An experience of religion is ex- 
ceedingly defective, in truth is no genuine 
religious experience, which ends at the mo- 
ment of consecration. It is one thing to 
be brought to the point where you can pray 
with true humility of spirit, " Thy will, not 
mine be done," and it is another and very 
different thing to begin patiently, stead- 

41 



42 Religion as a Personal Experience 

fastly to do what you know to be God's 
good-will, begin in very truth to enter 
upon the realization of your ideals. 

** I go, sir," said the responsive son of 
Jesus' parable, when his father bade him 
go work in his vineyard. In all probabil- 
ity the son had a real regard for his father, 
and fully intended to go and work; but 
*' he went not." He readily committed 
himself to the performance of a task which 
he never performed. His willingness to 
go was but a transient emotion. 

Thus many a would-be religious man 
has mistaken the emotion which attended 
the consecration of his life to God, for a 
genuine '* assurance of faith " which can 
be fully experienced only by those who are 
actually living the religious life. A vision 
may be vouchsafed me; I may eagerly en- 
gage to perform the task involved; and 
then after all miserably fail. 

** If any man will come after me let 
him deny himself, take up his cross, and 
follow me." It is the will and the deed, 
the will followed by the deed, that counts. 
He only is the true disciple who follows 
along the difficult way his Master trod, 
the way of self-denying service. The 
Kingdom of God of Jesus' vision will never 



The Service that Follows 43 

come on earth among men until Christians 
of all sects learn that there can be no 
true religion apart from a life of brotherly 
kindness and social justice. 

For a man is called upon to make the 
surrender of self, the consecration of his 
life to God, not as an end in itself, not as 
an attainment in itself of any real worth, 
but simply and solely as a means to a 
divine end. It is self-surrender for a very 
concrete and definite positive purpose', for 
nothing less than that man may become a 
co-worker with the Eternal God. The 
self-surrender, the consecration, is but the 
first necessary step to be taken in an ex- 
ceedingly long and laborious service to 
last as long as life lasts. In very truth, 
'* There is no discharge in that war." 

Burst out into joyous, exultant song 
when you have once and forever resolved 
to become reconciled to your ideal, you 
may and must, for the experience justifies 
it. Radiantly smile through your grate- 
ful tears as you kneel at the heart's inner 
shrine, and make the supreme consecration. 
** Arise, and go in peace," after you have 
once for all decided in the only reasonable 
and right way the most important question 
man is called upon to decide, to live as a 



44 Religion as a Personal Experience 

child of the good God ought to live. But 
do not be seriously disturbed because when 
you awake on the morrow the emotion of 
to-day may have subsided. Do not break 
down on the very threshold of the new life, 
just when you are summoned to prove the 
sincerity ojf your consecration by the fidel- 
ity of your service. Emotion or no emo- 
tion, that service must be entered upon 
now, from this very moment, and can be 
entered upon in spite of the absence of all 
emotional ardor, for true it is that 

" tasks in hours of insight willed 
Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.*' 

*' Lord, what wilt Thou have me to 
do?" From the moment of dedication 
the religious man will begin to do, to act, 
to achieve. He will not consent to be the 
dupe of a mere emotionalism. He will 
not be disobedient to the heavenly vision. 
What truth and justice and good-will to 
his fellow men require he will perform. 
Religion and ethics are one, and can not 
be separated. In the very act of conse- 
crating himself to God, he consecrates 
himself to the service of his fellow men. 
He can not begin to be a religious man 



The Service that Follows 45 

without beginning to be a moral man. 

What we call Christian Ethics is not a 
body of formal rules of conduct; it is the 
living of the Christ life, in the spirit 
in which the good Master lived it. It is 
the living to-day under modern conditions 
of the very life that Jesus of Nazareth 
lived in ancient Palestine under the condi- 
tions of his age. There can be no Chris- 
tian faith worthy of the name that is not 
grounded in Christian ethics. The argu-. 
ment of the Apostle James is unanswer- 
able: *'Show me thy faith apart from thy 
works and I by my works will show thee 
my faith." The highest morality is practi- 
cal religion in all human relationships. 
Religion is the broader term because it in- 
cludes morality. 

When we speak to-day of '* salvation by 
character," what we mean, I take it, is 
that we do not believe that there can be 
any salvation which does not save. We can 
not believe in any non-natural, magical res- 
cue from bondage to appetite and passion, 
to pride and greed : nor in any miraculous 
escape from future remorse and shame. 
The only faith that saves from the pres- 
ence and power of sin is a faith which in- 



4-6 Religion as a Personal Experience 

volves the resolute activity of the individ- 
ual who has sinned. He must sincerely 
repent of his sin, of all the wrongdoing 
of the past; he must steadfastly turn away 
from all wrongdoing; he must turn to 
God, the alone Good, and dedicate his life 
to Him; and trusting in the divine within 
himself, he must begin to do what is just 
and true and good. Salvation is nothing 
more nor less than the creating of a new 
character. What he becomes, the char- 
acter that he develops, is the only objec- 
tive test of his religion. 

'* As the hart panteth after the water 
brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee." 
The man who has come Into union with 
God alone appreciates what the Hebrew 
prophet is trying to express in these words. 
He ardently longs after a fuller and fuller 
possession of the very qualities of character 
which he perceives to be divine. Nothing 
less than the possession of them can satisfy 
him. 

He must be pure, holy In thought, in 
word and in deed, pure In his secret cham- 
ber as well as in the company of others. 
The purity he loves and seeks Is no mere 
negation; it is positive, active, aggressive. 
He Is the foe of whatever sullies the purity 



The Service that Follows 47 

of others. He would make the *^ beauty 
of holiness " irresistibly attractive to even 
the most indifferent. 

He must be true in all his speech, in all 
his acts; true at any cost. He will be too 
brave and loyal ever to compromise with 
falsehood. His reverence for truth will 
constrain him to choose to be true even at 
the sacrifice of place and power among 
men, even at the sacrifice of any and every 
material good. He will love truth bet- 
ter than he loves his own life. 

He must be just in things great and 
small, to every man. He will not only 
avoid all injustice; he will be positively 
just. He will be just to poor and rich 
alike, to the weak and powerful alike, to 
superior and to inferior, to employer and 
employe alike, to the alien and stranger as 
well as to friend and neighbor, to the black 
or red or yellow man as well as to the 
white man. He will be just in all his 
business relations, in all his political rela- 
tions, in all his social relations. 

He must be kind and generous, pos- 
sessed by the spirit of good-will. He will 
be kind and generous even to his enemies, 
to those who hate him and have grievously 
wronged him. What is possibly harder 



48 Religion as a Personal Experience 

still, he will be kind and generous to those 
whom he has wronged. A love that 
'' beareth all things, believeth all things, 
hopeth all things, endureth all things," 
will triumph in his daily life. His love 
will be so great that it will be impossible 
for him to separate his individual good, 
his personal happiness, security and well- 
being, from the good, happiness, security 
and well-being of others. He will never 
forget that '^ we be brethren," in the one 
great family of God the Father of us all. 
When his brothers and sisters suffer, he 
will suffer with them, and will not be com- 
forted until they, too, are comforted. In 
the critical situations of life his love will 
prove to be more than a mere sentiment; 
it will be active, aggressive, victorious 
good-will. 

To what particular form of human serv- 
ice he will devote himself will depend upon 
the circumstances of his life and training, 
upon his native and acquired gifts, upon 
his individual tastes, upon the opportuni- 
ties that are presented to him. His very 
livelihood itself will be his particular form 
of service, and the spirit in which he pur- 
sues it will be profoundly religious. No 
one can dictate to another just how that 



The Service that Follows 49 

other can best serve. Every form of gen- 
uine, helpful human service, every serv- 
ice that actually ministers to the legiti- 
mate needs of man is alike honorable, 
provided only the motive be equally pure 
and disinterested. Every man, and not 
alone the minister of religion, ought to 
pursue a divine calling, ought to hear the 
voice of God calling him to his particular 
life work. It should be a ** God-given 
best " to which he responds. 

When the disciples rebuked the woman 
who broke a cruse of the costly ointment 
of spikenard and lavishly poured it out 
upon the head and feet of her beloved 
Master, Jesus in turn rebuked them; '' Let 
her alone; why trouble ye her? . . . She 
hath done what she could." In her en- 
deavor to show her love and gratitude 
she followed her clearest leading. In this 
simple story is taught a most valuable les- 
son. 

Who are we to disapprove of and de- 
nounce as wasteful and impractical any 
form of genuine human service, no matter 
how widely it may differ from our own? 
The consecrated artist serves when he 
paints beautiful pictures or carves noble 
statues, or designs and erects admirable 



50 Religion as a Personal 'Experience 

buildings, or composes sublime symphonies 
just as truly as the minister of religion, 
or the teacher in the school, or the mother 
in the home, or the business man at his 
desk, or the carpenter at his bench. Pro- 
vided only that there be the same spirit 
of consecration, the digger of a useful 
ditch or the builder of a safe road serves 
just as truly as the prime minister of a 
great state. And Milton is right. Given 
the same consecration, 

^^ They also serve who only stand and wait." 

It Is the spirit in which one does what he 
can, rather than what he does. No 
matter how restricted the range of one's 
activities, the spirit to serve must be con- 
trolling. 

What repelled George Eliot in the teach- 
ing of so many professed Christians of 
her time is certainly not so common as it 
was, but in many quarters it still persists. 
She called the religion which insisted so 
exclusively, as it seemed to her, upon In- 
dividual preparation for a future world, 
while it so tragically ignored efforts put 
forth to transform this present world Into 
the Kingdom of God, the religion of 
*' other-worldliness." What must I do to 



The Service that Follows 51 

be saved? signifies to multitudes of people, 
What must I do to escape future punish- 
ment and attain future blessedness? not 
What must I do to be delivered from a self- 
ish life here and now? 

*^ One world at a time/' was Father 
Taylor's gentle rebuke of this religion of 
^* other-worldliness," for he knew that a 
genuine experience of religion is the best 
possible preparation for the enjoyment of 
any world. The ardent devotee fleeing 
from the cares and distractions of the world 
about her, willfully evading its serious re- 
sponsibilities, ignoring its numerous and 
importunate calls for personal service, to 
kneel in raptures before a sacred shrine 
in some protected cell, represents an ab- 
normal and unwholesome type of religion. 
Not apart from the world, apart from his 
fellow men, alone In some secret chamber 
before a shrine does a man's religious ex- 
perience come to perfect flower, but in the 
crowded street, on errands of mercy, or in 
the noisome tenement house, or in the 
chamber of pain. '' My meat is to do the 
will of Him who sent me." My life is to 
do the will of Him who sent me. 

No; man can not experience religion 
alone; he never could; he never can. In- 



52 Religion as a Personal Experience 

deed there has never been a great religious 
teacher among any people who has not 
taught with greater or less clearness this 
fundamental truth, that there can not be 
any assurance of salvation, any conscious- 
ness of union with the good God which 
does not come through association with 
others along the lines of human service 
here and now. There can not be any 
purely individualistic religion worthy of 
the sacred name of religion, which begins 
and ends with a mere subjective experi- 
ence. 

This does not mean that the most spir- 
itual of men must always live in the public 
eye. It was a profound need that drove 
the good Master out into the wilderness, 
or up into the mountain under the stars, or 
beside the silent sea, to be alone with God, 
to meditate and pray. Without these 
hours of solitude he could not do the work 
he was sent to do. Paul in the crises of 
his life, Martin Luther in the crises of his 
life, Abraham Lincoln in the crises of his 
life, needed these hours of solitude just 
as Jesus did. The modern religious man 
needs them just as much, for the active life 
must be renewed by these hours of soli- 
tary reflection. To replenish its exhausted 



The Service that Follows 53 

energies, to marshal its disorganized 
forces, the individual soul must often be 
alone with its God. Most great benefi- 
cent deeds are preceded by meditation and 
prayer. 

All such hours of meditation and prayer 
apart from one's fellows, however, are but 
seasons of preparation, simply means to 
the one divine end of human service. 
They are but to aid the consecrated man 
the better to serve his brethren, to serve 
them more wisely, heartily, efficiently, and 
prove equal to all the emergencies of life. 
It is the service of men, and not contem- 
plation, meditation, that must constitute 
the center of life. 

God is my Father; man is my brother. 
Until I become consciously a child of God, 
at one with Him, and because I am His 
child, a brother to all God's children, the 
humblest and the meanest as well as the 
most exalted, my personal life has not come 
to complete fulfillment. I must find God 
for myself " down among His people," 
wherever wrongs are to be righted, where- 
ever sorrowful hearts are to be comforted. 
To experience religion, ** pure and un- 
defiled religion," is to become a citizen 
of the Kingdom of God of Jesus' Vision, 



54 Religion as a Personal Experience 

a useful and loyal citizen. The Kingdom 
of God means the transfiguration of the 
present world, the reign of truth, purity, 
justice and good-will here and now. It is 
only as I am working with all my rriind and 
heart to advance the interests of this King- 
dom of God, that I can at last come to 
know what personal religion actually 
means, that I can attain the assurance of 
faith so vividly described by prophets and 
saints of every age and of every race. 



THE ASSURANCE OF FAITH 



THE ASSURANCE OF FAITH 

Whoever has won a victory over his 
lower animal self, has consecrated his life 
to God and the prosecution of high and 
worthy spiritual ends, has actually begun 
to serve those about him in the spirit of 
good-will, must sooner or later experience 
an inward assurance, a firm persuasion of 
faith, an unshaken confidence in the pres- 
ence and power of God in his personal life. 
This *' full assurance of faith," as the au- 
thor of the Epistle to the Hebrews de- 
scribes it, is the crown of a personal expe- 
rience of religion. No faithful and obedi- 
ent child of God can forever remain in 
darkness and uncertainty. '' If any man 
willeth to do His will, he shall know of 
the teaching," is just as true to-day as it 
was nineteen hundred years ago. If the 
conditions are fulfilled this assurance will 
just as certainly come as the light will come 
in the morning, as the flowers will come 

55 



56 Religion as a Personal Experience 

i.n the spring. Sooner or later there will 
come to the man who is doing the will of 
God the abiding conviction that he is not 
alone, struggling alone towards the shin- 
ing heights, but that the Great Companion 
is with him to give him and the cause he 
serves ultimate victory. 

No voice of approval and assurance may 
speak to him from without, although so 
clear and vivid may be the experience that 
many persons have actually thought that 
they heard such a voice and have re- 
sponded to it. But from within the voice 
will certainly speak; through man's own 
spiritual nature will the Eternal Spirit be 
revealed. '' The Spirit Himself beareth 
witness with our spirit that we are the chil- 
dren of God." 

^^ Go not my soul in search of Him, 
But to thyself repair; 
Wait thou within the silence dim, 
And thou shalt find Him there." 

If this is God's world, and man be not 
merely a creature but a child of God, the 
child ought to know it and live perpetually 
in the joy of such a knowledge. If man 
has grown a soul, and has come to feel his 
need of religion; if he has consecrated his 



The Assurance of Faith 57 

life to the highest and holiest and best that 
he has been able to conceive, to his God; 
if he has begun to live for others, live not 
to be served but to serve; he will find re- 
pose in the Eternal. *' Lord, Thou mad- 
est us for Thyself, and our heart is rest- 
less until it repose in Thee." Find repose 
in God, experience the full assurance of 
faith, every child of God living the divine 
life most certainly will. 

This assurance, this confidence, this firm 
persuasion of faith, however, does not 
come to all persons in the same manner. 
It may come very gradually like the dawn 
in our Northern land; or it may come more 
suddenly, as day bursts upon tropic lands ; 
or it may come like a lightning flash, and 
abide forever. As far as we know, Jesus 
of Nazareth never remembered the time 
when he was not consciously a child of 
God, living in his Father's world, engaged 
in his Father's business. When twelve 
years of age in the temple at Jerusalem 
there was but one motive which controlled 
him; *' Wist ye not that I must be about 
my Father's business"? To Saint Paul 
the experience came later in life after his 
dazzling vision. 

To Saint Augustine it came suddenly, 



58 Religion as a Personal Experience 

*' by a light as it were of serenity infused 
into my heart." To Saint Francis of As- 
sisi it came only after a long travail of 
spirit, several years after he had forsaken 
his selfish pleasures and had begun to fol- 
low in the footsteps of his Master. To 
Savonarola it came gradually while he was 
engaged in his work for the reformation 
of the morals of the people of Italy. 
Martin Luther attained it by degrees; he 
had been two years a monk before his 
heart was at rest, and he was consciously 
at one with God. 

Although as a child George Fox *' knew 
pureness and righteousness," as he 
quaintly confesses, it was not until years 
afterward that the " inner light " dawned 
upon his soul. In the tireless service of 
his Master it steadily grew clearer and 
brighter. 

During all the years in which John Wes- 
ley was engaged in the service of others, 
in Oxford and in America, with the chief 
motive, as he confesses, of saving his own 
soul, he was restless, inwardly dissatisfied, 
without any assurance of faith; he was try- 
ing to be a good man, a Christian man, 
but he did not know what personal re- 
ligion means. It was only when at last, 



The Assurance of Faith 59 

at the age of thirty-five, he had forgotten 
all about himself in his devoted service for 
the salvation of others, that he tells us, 
** I felt my heart strangely warmed . . . 
and an assurance was given me." From 
that hour he became the great evangelist 
to the people of eighteenth century Eng- 
land and America. 

Theodore Parker like Edward Everett 
Hale seems never to have remembered 
the time when he was not in conscious fel- 
lowship with God. He is describing his 
own experience when he says: ''In the 
child it is only the faint twilight, the be- 
ginning of religion, that you take notice 
of, like the voice of the bluebird and the 
phoebe, coming early in March, but only 
as a prelude of that whole summer of joy- 
ous song which, when the air is delicate, 
will ere long gladden and beautify the pro- 
creant nest." 

To James Martineau at the age of 
seventeen, when he was engaged in learn- 
ing to be an engineer, '' under a sudden 
flash and stroke of sorrow," as he de- 
scribes it, '' the scales fell from his eyes, 
and the realities and solemnities of life 
first came upon him. Here it was that the 
religious part of his life commenced; in 



6o Religion as a Personal Experience 

fact, the light was so overpowering and 
so strong, that it bore him from the work- 
shop of his occupation, and turned him 
from an engineer into an evangelist." It 
was to this sudden experience that he re- 
ferred in old age, as the beginning of his 
conscious religious life: "Who can ever 
forget the intense and lofty years when 
first the real communion of the Living 
God — the same God that received the 
cries of Gethsemane and Calvary — and 
the sanctity of the inward Law, and the 
sublime contents of life on both sides of 
death, broke in a flood of glory upon his 
mind, and spread the world before him 
stripped of his surface-illusions, and with 
its diviner essence cleared." 

This vivid consciousness of the reality 
of the unseen world, this assurance of faith, 
is but the consummation of a personal re- 
ligious experience; it is impossible for it 
to stand alone. It comes only to the sin- 
cere, self-forgetting soul, only to him who 
has made the supreme consecration, who 
has entered upon the life of human serv- 
ice. "He that seeketh, findeth; and to 
him that knocketh, it shall be opened." 
All who have thus experienced religion for 
themselves can unite and clasp hands across 



The Assurance of Faith 6i 

the chasm of race and of creed and of 
years. There is not one way for the 
European to experience religion, and 
another for the Asiatic, and another for 
the African. There was not one way of 
experiencing religion nineteen hundred 
years ago, and another way for our pres- 
ent age; one way for Paul, and another 
way for Martineau. The assurance of 
faith is one and the same for all. '' The 
seekers of the light are one." 

^* One in the freedom of the truth, 
One in the joy of paths untrod, 
One in the soul's perennial youth, 
One in the larger thought of God.'' 

Hymns of all languages that have sprung 
out of a personal experience of re- 
ligion can be sung by all who share the 
experience. The language may differ; 
the symbols employed may differ; but the 
essential spirit of them all is the same. It 
is indeed a glorious company of apostles, 
prophets, martyrs and saints that unite in 
praising the one and only God and Father 
of us all! 

But how shall this assurance of faith 
be tested? How shall we be able to dis- 
tinguish between what is true and what is 



62 Religion as a Personal Experience 

spurious? ** Wherefore by their fruits ye 
shall know them," by their conduct, by 
their lives. An assurance of faith is of 
no value whatsoever unless it has back of 
it a divine life. ** The fruit of the spirit 
is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentle- 
ness, goodness, faith, meekness, temper- 
ance." This is the actual fruit a man's 
life must bear before he can have any con- 
fidence in the genuineness of his professed 
assurance. 

Longfellow's poem entitled ^* Legend 
Beautiful " teaches an often neglected 
truth. The Blessed Vision had visited the 
cell of a monk who was the devoted al- 
moner of the Brotherhood. While he 
was rapturously kneeling before his radi- 
ant guest, the convent bell rang clamor- 
ously, summoning him to go and minister 
to the sick and the poor who were throng- 
ing the courtyard. Should he go and for- 
sake the Blessed Vision, or should he 
stay? 

" Then a voice within his breast 
Whispered, audible and clear 
As if to the outward ear: 
Do thy duty; that is best; 
Leave unto thy Lord the rest." 

He immediately rose, left the cell and 



The Assurance of Faith 63 

went and ministered to the sick and the 
poor. When he returned to his cell an 
hour later, in a somewhat weary and de- 
spondent mood, there was the Blessed 
Vision as before, only more divine. 

" Hadst thou stayed, I must have fled.** 

The Blessed Vision is a fit symbol of 
what we mean by an assurance of faith. 
The mystic vision, the confident inner as- 
surance of being at one with God, comes 
only to him who is devoted to the service 
of his fellow men, and abides with him 
only so long as he resists the temptation to 
be diverted from the active to the contem- 
plative life. And to such a man, sooner 
or later, it will come. For there is notli- 
ing strained or unnatural or morbid about 
such an assurance. " The most recent 
psychology," says Prof. Winchester in his 
** Life of John Wesley," when he comes to 
speak of Wesley's critical experience of 
religion, ** pronounces these sudden transi- 
tions from a lower to a higher, a perturbed 
to a restful spiritual state, however caused, 
to be no proof of morbid or abnormal 
psychical conditions, but rather, in countless 
instances, to mark the ingress of new truth 



64 Religion as a Personal Experience 

r 

and new motives otherwise inaccessible.'' 
Such experiences imply a spiritual psychol- 
ogy, but is there any other psychology 
worthy of the name? 

A half century ago, it seemed to many 
of the brightest minds of Europe and 
America that the entire universe could be 
explained, adequately explained, in terms 
of matter and force. The marvelous dis- 
coveries of modern physical science had 
for the moment intoxicated men, swept 
them off their feet. Walt Whitman well 
describes the attitude of the age in these 
lines from the *' Song of the Universal " : 

" Lo ! keen-eyed towering Science, 

As from tall peaks the modern overlooking, 

Successive absolute fiats issuing. 

Yet again, lo! the Soul above all Science, 

For it has history gathered like husks about the 

globe, 

For it the star-myriads roll through the sky. 
• •••••• 

For it the partial to the permanent flowing. 
For it the real to the ideal tends.'' 

The reign of philosophical Naturalism 
was short-lived, and we of the present gen- 
eration are living in the age of the *' Soul," 
of Spiritual Reality. Even most scholars 



The Assurance of Faith 65 

devoted to the study of physical science 
have become more modest in the claims 
they put forth ; they have come to perceive 
more clearly, to discriminate more care- 
fully, to appreciate more profoundly. 
Many of them are frank enough to recog- 
nize the truth of Kepler's words, '* I think 
Thy thoughts after Thee, O God." Lord 
Kelvin, up to his death a short time ago 
England's foremost physicist, was a pro- 
nounced advocate of a spiritual psychol- 
ogy. To him the soul was ^' above all 
science." He knew from his own experi- 
ence what personal religion means. And 
this is true of Sir Oliver Lodge and of 
other men of science of the same rank. 

It can not be denied, however, that there 
are among us many pure, high-minded 
men and women who are heartily devoted 
to the service of man, and yet who can not 
find God, can not attain the assurance of 
faith of which we speak. These reverent 
truth-seekers declare that they do not 
know. They know what love to man 
means; what love to God means, they do 
not know. 

The negative testimony of even these 
best of men and women can not in the 
slightest degree disturb the faith of those 



66 Religion as a Personal Experience 

who possess an experience of their own, 
and who '^ know whom they have be- 
lieved." Those who know pass no ungen- 
erous criticism upon their fellow workers 
in the holy cause of humanity, and do not 
question their fellow workers' sincerity. 
What they do question is, whether these 
sincere comrades have been seeking for 
God in the right quarter; whether they may 
not have been trying to grasp by means of 
purely intellectual processes what must be 
acquired in an entirely different manner. 
According to the testimony of the great- 
est religious teachers of every age the way 
of religion is so plain and simple that 
'* wayfaring men, though fools, shall not 
err therein." Is it not possible that for 
many persons in our highly sophisticated 
age the way of religion Is too plain and 
simple to be easily recognized? They are 
looking for something so very different. 
They have been wont to grapple with dif- 
ficult and intricate problems, and in the 
very contest to experience the keenest de- 
light. They are disappointed, almost 
grieved, when in place of what they ex- 
pect, there is pointed out to them the 
homely way along which so many common 
wayfarers are traveling. '' Suffer little 



The Assurance of Faith 67 

children to come unto me, and forbid them 
not, for of such is the kingdom of God." 
*' Except ye be converted and become as 
little children, ye can not enter into the 
kingdom of heaven." Such a simple, child- 
like self-surrender shocks their pride. 

Or may there not be lurking in their 
minds a survival of that mischievous prej- 
udice of certain forms of early Puritanism 
against a religion that is not stern and 
somber? The assurance of faith which 
multitudes of their fellows experience is 
too good to be true. They positively dis- 
trust what brings happiness and peace. 
Just because this assurance of personal re- 
ligion so marvelously transfigures human 
life and irradiates even difficult and dreary 
and most trying human experiences, it must 
be mere self-delusion. 

No, no ! religion at its best is not stern 
and somber and forbidding; it is the most 
attractive thing in human life, the fullest 
of joy and blessedness and content. The 
assurance of faith means that man has 
come to his own in a divine universe. 
Man is the child of the Eternal Father! 
Why should he not rejoice, rejoice ever- 
more? All men are God's beloved chil- 
dren! 



68 Religion as a Personal Experience 

'' God's in his heaven — 
All's right with the world/' 

At the secret heart of things all is right. 
Every human child is on the way towards 
perfection. The universe is one; there is 
no permanent dualism within it. There 
is work enough for the children of God 
to do to set right what seems to be wrong 
with the existing order, but it is work 
towards 

** one far-off divine event, 

Towards which the whole creation moves.'* 

It is work together with God; it is God's 
own work. 

Can there be anything selfish, divisive, 
ignoble, in this joyful assurance? There 
is nothing in it but what makes a man or 
a woman a more devoted son or daughter, 
a father or mother a more devoted parent, 
a citizen a more alert and courageous serv* 
ant of the commonweal, a brother man a 
more loyal and affectionate brother. An 
experience of religion which is consum- 
mated in such an assurance of faith means 
that at last the individual life has come to 
perfect ffower, the individual man into per- 
fect union with God. 



VI 



THE TRANSFIGURATION OF 
LIFE 



VI 

THE TRANSFIGURATION OF LIFE 

*^ Old things are passed away; behold, all 
things are become new." So it seemed to 
Saint Paul after he had been delivered 
from " this body of death," after he had 
begun to live the very life of Jesus Christ, 
to spend himself in the service of his 
brethren, *' in labor and travail, in watch- 
ings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings 
often, in cold and nakedness." '' If God 
be for us who can be against us? " 

Just such a transfiguration follows upon 
a genuine experience of personal religion 
to-day. ''Old things are passed away; 
behold, all things are become new." 
Whenever a man comes into accord with 
his higher self, into harmony with the di- 
vine will, and gives himself in true self- 
forgetfulness to the service of others, the 
entire world — the world of physical na- 
ture and the world of human nature — 
becomes transformed. It is a fresh, new, 

69 



70 Religion as a Personal Experience 

divine world out upon which he looks, 
everywhere filled by a mysterious divine 
presence, 

'* A presence that disturbs me with the joy 

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime 

Of something far more deeply interfused." 

Every place upon which he stands be- 
comes holy ground. In the flower-strewn 
meadow, in the recesses of the forest, in 
the ocean waves, in the purple hills, in the 
snow mountains, in the sunset sky, in the 
overarching starry spaces at midnight, in 
the Madonna's smile, in the faces of little 
children, in every heroic action, in every 
homely service of man to man, he beholds 
God. All the world becomes suffused 
with 

** The light that never was on sea or land, 
The consecration and the poet's dream." 

** The consecration " is what transforms 
the ordinary common-place man into a 
poet, a seer who henceforth lives, not by 
bread alone, but by ** admiration, faith and 
love." All visible things become symbols 
of spiritual realities which '' eye hath not 
seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered 
into the heart of man." 



The Transfiguration of Life 71 

He who has experienced religion for 
himself has found God for himself, is 
never alone, is nowhere alone. ** Whither 
shall I go from Thy spirit, or whither shall 
I flee from Thy presence?" 

" Speak to Him thou, for He hears, and Spirit 

with Spirit can meet — 
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than 

hands and feet/* 

For him prayer ceases to be a mere 
formal exercise, cold and lifeless, and be- 
comes vital, throbbing with spiritual mean- 
ing. It becomes actual communion with 
the Great Companion, spirit communing 
with Spirit, friend meeting Friend, child 
gazing confidently up into the Father's 
face. It becomes the throwing wide open 
of all the avenues of approach to one's be- 
ing to the instreaming of divine light and 
power and love. 

** I do not pray because I would, 
I pray because I must: 
There is no meaning in my prayer 
But thankfulness and trust." 

So long as a man's religion rests upon 
the testimony of others, is a mere hearsay 
religion, he has never learned what true 



72 Religion as a Personal Experience 

prayer means ; he first begins to pray when 
he finds God for himself. Henceforth he 
does not need to be told what are, and what 
are not the proper objects of prayer. He 
does not need to discuss the question as to 
what changes are effected by prayer, for 
such questions have lost their significance 
and have become trivial. Instead of phi- 
losophizing about prayer, he begins to 
pray. It becomes the most natural thing 
for him to pour out into the ear of 
his Heavenly Father all his secret long- 
ings and aspirations, all his hopes and 
fears, and to rejoice in the divine sym- 
pathy, comfort and strength which come 
to him through prayer. In such personal 
communion everything that affects the 
welfare of a child of God is important, 
and it becomes irrelevant to seek to dis- 
criminate between what is great or small, 
what is trifling or important. " Are not 
five sparrows sold for two farthings, and 
not one of them is forgotten before God? 
But even the very hairs of your head are 
all numbered. Fear not, therefore; ye 
are of more value than many sparrows." 
" Fear not." It is in the trust which 
conquers all fear, in the trust which is vic- 
torious over all doubt and despair that 



The Transfiguration of Life 73 

personal religion culminates. ** Take no 
thought for your life/' does not mean to 
live without painstaking plan, without 
proper provision for the future; it means 
to live without anxiety, without tormenting 
care, without fear. The victory has been 
won, even although one may not always 
be conscious of it. As we know very well, 
even the most devoted of men can not al- 
ways feel alike, can not always and every- 
where be equally conscious of the divine 
presence. There come times when emo- 
tional ardor has cooled, and when phys- 
ical weakness and pain have obscured the 
vision of the spirit. 

They have dulled the vision of the spirit; 
they have not obliterated it. Even amid 
the darkest sorrows, the most disturbing 
perplexities of human experience, when the 
burdens of the religious man seem to be 
greater than he can bear, when his path- 
way seems to be closed by insuperable ob- 
stacles, and he halts in trouble and 
bewilderment, almost heart-broken, un- 
certain in which direction to turn, he is 
not forsaken, he is not left alone, he does 
not despair. The voice of gentle stillness 
which whispers *' Peace, Peace," the light 
which steadfastly shines about him, the un- 



74 Religion as a Personal Experience 

seen hand which guides along the perilous 
way, is the voice of God sounding more 
clearly, the light of God shining more 
brightly, the hand of God gripping more 
firmly in just so far as he remains un- 
shaken in his resolution to live the divine 
life, and to make righteousness and good- 
will his chief concern. 

^' O my Father, if it be possible, let this 
cup pass from me ! " Such a cry of agony 
may be wrung from his heart, as it was 
wrung from the heart of Jesus in the 
Garden of Gethsemane. But the spirit of 
trust and obedience will not fail. '' O 
my Father, if this cup may not pass away 
from me, except I drink it. Thy will be 
done!'' 

No disappointment, no pain, no sorrow, 
no loss of friends and loved ones, no 
threatened peril to the beloved cause, nor 
the approach of death itself '' shall be able 
to separate us from the love of God," from 
the conscious support and comfort of the 
Heavenly Father. The surface of the life 
of the child of God may be lashed into a 
very tumult of commotion, but down below 
In the deeps of his nature there will remain 
quietness and repose, '^ the peace of God 



The Transfiguration of Life 75 

that passeth all understanding." All 
transient surface emotions will yield to the 
abiding convictions in the deeps of his na- 
ture. 

He who lives constantly in fellowship 
with God will not be seriously amazed and 
disturbed even by the many difficult moral 
problems which here and now he is unable 
to solve. He knows too well how nar- 
rowly he is hemmed in by natural and in- 
evitable barriers. '' For now we see 
through a glass darkly . . . now I know 
in part." There is an eternal future in 
which to learn, in which to acquire fuller 
and more adequate knowledge. '* When 
that which is perfect is come, then that 
which is in part shall be done away." 
Somewhere, sometime, when we come to 
see '' face to face," all these difficult moral 
problems shall be solved. 

For the present, he possesses a clue to 
the mystery; holds in his hand " the guid- 
ing thread so fine along the mighty laby- 
rinth " ; and this is enough. He is 
thoroughly convinced that partial knowl- 
edge, instead of being of little worth, is 
of great worth, is genuine knowledge as 
far as it goes; that the circle of light within 



76 Religion as a Personal Experience 

which he securely moves is no less bright 
because there is darkness all about it. 
And he knows, too, that the circle grows 
wider and wider, has actually grown wider 
and wider since he became obedient to the 
divine laws. 

In just so far as he knows, he will obey. 
He will trust; he will pray; he will toil. 
All remediable human suffering he will 
seek to relieve; all the wrongs of human 
society he will resolutely labor to set 
right. He will find his supreme joy in 
this very toil. Because he is at one with 
God all his efforts to realize on earth the 
Kingdom of God of Jesus' vision will be 
not only whole-hearted and tireless, but 
patient and hopeful, for does not God the 
Eternal Right work through him and to- 
gether with him? His work is God's 
work; it is his just because it is God's. 

His suffering and toiling brethren for 
whom his heart bleeds are God's children, 
every one of them; they are objects of a 
love infinitely transcending his own. The 
Eternal God is not only the Creator of 
men; He is the suffering Savior of men, 
suffering with them that He may redeem 
them, that *' out of weakness " they may be 
" made strong." 



The Transfiguration of Life 77 

*' Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ulti- 
mate gift, 

That I doubt His own love can compete with it ? 
Here the parts shift? 

Here the creature surpass the Creator, — the end, 
what Began? 

Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all for 
this man, 

And dare doubt He alone shall not help him, 
who yet alone can? '* 

The confident assurance that because 
God is good, good must finally triumph in 
every human life, 

'' that good shall fall 
At last — far off — at last, to all, 
And every winter change to spring," 

will not make the man v^ho has experi- 
enced religion a mere inactive spectator, 
a quietist; v^ill not in the slightest degree 
lessen his vigorous participation in the 
struggle towards the final good. What it 
will do is this; it will reenforce his courage, 
give him proper poise, save him from de- 
spondency and despair, make him divinely 
patient even when the struggle seems most 
desperate. ** He that believeth shall not 
make haste," and only he that believeth. 
One never employs such terms as haste 
and hurry when speaking of the work of a 



78 Religion as a Personal Experience 

truly great man, a man at one with God. 
His work always gives the beholder a con- 
sciousness of power held in reserve. It 
is so well done just because no haste, no 
anxiety, no feverish impatience, has en- 
tered into the doing of it. The really 
great man works zealously, steadfastly 
but never wastefully; he works calmly, 
with the repose, not of exhaustion nor of 
weakness, but with the repose of power. 
He has learned the secret of the repose of 
the Eternal Father, and therefore his 
work is efficient, beneficent, enduring. 
Fluctuations of feeling, varying degrees of 
clearness in his convictions, in the vividness 
of his faith, the religious man must expect; 
for while he is spirit akin to the Eternal 
Spirit, he is here and now an embodied 
spirit, more or less subject to the muta- 
tions of the physical organism he uses. 
As Saint Paul so well describes it, *' We 
have this treasure in earthen vessels." 
Even after the transfiguration on the 
mount of vision the good Master was 
obliged to go down from the mountain into 
the desolate plain to grapple with the grim 
forces of evil. Emotional reactions must 
be expected and provided for. Just as in 
the olden time the sacrifice must be daily 



The Transfiguration of Life 79 

repeated, and the light before the altar 
constantly replenished, so must the experi- 
ence of religion be constantly renewed, the 
consecration made over and over again, 
the human service be ever begun afresh. 

It is no mere magical transfiguration 
which we are attempting to describe, an ex- 
perience which once possessed will always 
suffice. The very first act of the busiest 
day must be the reconsecration of the life 
to God, and the last conscious act of the 
waking hours must be the renewal of the 
consecration. Only thus will the days 
be bound together into one perfect whole. 

Thus consecrated, thus hallowed, in the 
abiding assurance of faith, in joyous benefi- 
cent activity, will the days of the conscious 
child of God pass swiftly into years. 
Every year will grow better and better, 
fuller of human interest and of a divine 
content. And old age itself will be trans- 
figured, glorified. To think of old age as 
a period in life to be dreaded, as a period 
of vain regret, of a fond backward gazing 
towards the joys and satisfactions of youth, 
is to think of the human spirit as subject 
to decay. To the conscious child of God 
old age will be a period of eager, joyous 
anticipation of '' the best that is to be.'* 



8o Religion as a Personal Experience 

The truly religious man will grow old beau- 
tifully, as the leaves upon the trees of our 
Northern land grow more beautiful as they 
pass from the green of summer to the crim- 
son, purple and gold of autumn. As the 
fruits of the orchard mellow and ripen to- 
wards the harvest time, so will a religious 
man's nature mellow and ripen with the 
advancing years. Browning's Rabbi Ben 
Ezra is the type of what every old age 
ought to be : 

^' Grow old along with me! 
The best is yet to be, 

The last of life for which the first was made: 
Our times are in His hand 
Who saith, ' A whole I planned, 
Youth shows but half ; trust God : see all, nor be 
afraid.' " 

Whoever has found God for himself, 
whoever has experienced personal religion, 
sees all, and is not afraid. He has caught 
at least a glimpse of the whole as planned. 
To him the transfiguration of life means, 
also, the transfiguration of what in our ig- 
norance we call death. He is fully per- 
suaded that death is but an incident in the 
life of the children of God. Life, the only 
life worth considering, goes right on in a 
straight line, this side of death, and be- 



The Transfiguration of Life 8i 

yond. Death ends nothing except griev- 
ous bondage to this body of flesh and 
blood. The child of the Eternal can not 
die, can not cease to exist. He can not 
fall by the wayside just as he has begun to 
climb towards the shining heights. His 
moral tasks, his service of love, his benefi- 
cent activities are commenced here, only 
commenced ; they must be continued yonder 
under freer and more favorable conditions. 
His ideals, his highest and holiest ideals, 
beckon him forward, forward forever! 
He trusts the inspirations of the world's 
greatest poets and prophets, because there 
is something within him that assures him 
of the truth of what they see. 

"Joy, shipmate, joy! 
(Pleas'd to my soul at death I cry) 
Our life is closed, our life begins, 
The long, long anchorage we leave, 
The ship is clear at last, she leaps ! 
She swiftly courses from the shore, 
Joy, shipmate, joy.'^ 



VII 

WORSHIPING AND WORKING 
TOGETHER 



VII 

WORSHIPING AND WORKING TOGETHER 

For centuries throughout Christendom it 
has been customary to divide human beings 
into two mutually exclusive classes, saints 
and sinners, the saved and the unsaved, 
the sheep and the goats of the Gospel par- 
able ; but the modern world has learned to 
discriminate more carefully. If there is 
to be any division into classes — a rather 
perilous undertaking at the best — at least 
three, rather than two, must be recognized. 
First there is a comparatively small class of 
persons who '^ fear not God, nor regard 
man," but live hard, narrow, selfish lives, 
feeding upon husks, the food of swine 
and not men. These persons seem to be 
utterly indifferent to the Eternal Values; 
they seem never to have grown a human 
soul. They are certainly defectives, and 
must be treated as such. A few of them 
may be described as degenerates. 

There is a second and much more 

82 



Worshiping and Working Together 83 

numerous class of men and women who, 
while often living very much as those who 
compose the first class, described above, 
are more or less discontented with them- 
selves, and with their selfishness and sin. 
They have come to possess ideals to which 
in a fitful fashion they seek to be loyal. 
They believe in God and desire to do His 
will ; they actually desire to live for others, 
to engage in some beneficent service. But 
they are weak and vacillating, the crea- 
tures of varying impulses and moods. 
Many of them may be described as having 
" come to themselves," and as having 
started on the way home from ** the far 
country " into which they had strayed, 
even although they do not seem to have 
made much progress on the way. 

And finally, there are those who may be 
said to have attained, to have reached 
home, to have found God, to be in purpose 
and will at one with Him, to be devoting 
themselves wholeheartedly to the service 
of their fellow men. By reason of their 
simple trust, perfect consecration, loyal 
service, they are rejoicing in the assurance 
of faith, an assurance which nothing can 
disturb. They do not claim to be saints 
because they have learned to appreciate 



84 Religion as a Personal Experience 

what saintship implies; because they have 
won ideals so far in advance of their 
present attainment. What they do claim, 
however, is their divine inheritance, their 
right to be called the children of God; and 
by their lives of purity, truthfulness, right- 
eousness and love they seek to justify their 
claim. These are the men and women 
who constitute the ** one holy church of 
God," that spiritual body which appears 

" Through every age and race, 
Unwasted by the lapse of years, 
Unchanged by changing place." 

The members of this spiritual body are 
to be found under every form of organized 
religion, and outside of all organizations. 
In many respects they are diverse from one 
another. They do not think alike and can 
not subscribe to the same creeds; they do 
not explain their religious experience In 
the same way, do not employ the same rit- 
ual of worship, do not participate in the 
same sacraments, are not engaged in the 
same forms of human service. And yet, 
inasmuch as they all share one common 
spirit, are entirely one in purpose and 
practical aim, whenever and wherever they 
meet, they recognize one another as fel- 



Worshiping and Working Together 85 

low-worshipers and fellow-workers, wor- 
shiping the same God, though it may be 
under different names, working together 
loyally towards one common Brotherhood 
of Man. Though they do not belong to 
the same visible church, they belong to the 
one invisible spiritual body, the One Holy 
Catholic Church. I trust, I love, I serve, 
not simply I believe, is the pass-word that 
is .never disregarded among these children 
of the good God. 

Between those who differ so widely from 
one another in taste, in temperament, in 
natural gifts, between those who possess 
different degrees of culture, who speak dif- 
ferent languages, who inherit different 
traditions, there naturally can be no or- 
ganic unity, not even upon the most gen- 
erous terms. Even the wisest and 
saintliest of men will describe the God in 
whom they believe, the God whom they 
have found for themselves, in language 
more or less colored by the philosophical 
school in which they have been trained, by 
the race to which they belong, by the age 
in which they live. Granted that the 
truth at the heart of all religions is one and 
the same, men's interpretations of that 
truth will never be the same; neither will 



86 Religion as a Personal Experience 

their ecclesiastical organizations be the 
same. Their organizations will differ as 
their theologies differ. 

In so far as the religion of the spirit 
gains the ascendency in all these religious 
organizations, however, this is what we 
have a right to expect; these organizations 
shall cease to be hostile to one another, 
cease to be divisive centers fostering the 
bitterness of envy and jealousy among 
their adherents, and shall more and more 
foster the spirit of sympathy and good- 
will. For are they not all engaged in the 
same undertaking, fighting the same battle 
against one common enemy, worldliness, 
indifference to the claims of high ideals, 
selfish greed in all its protean forms? Are 
they not all seeking the same goal, a re- 
deemed human society? As true spirit- 
uality gains the ascendency, these various 
organizations will become friendly, co- 
operative bodies, everywhere presenting to 
the common enemy one united front; all 
working together towards the one common 
goal. 

Naturally and fittingly may one cherish 
his own religious body, highly prize his own 
theological or philosophical system, be- 
cause this has helped him to find God for 



Worshiping and Working Together 87 

himself, has quickened his personal re- 
ligious life; but the God whom he has 
found to be his companion and friend is 
not the exclusive God of his sect, but the 
God of the whole earth, the God and 
Father of all men. His experience of re- 
ligion did not come to him by reason of 
what his church holds apart from his fel- 
low men, apart from the disciples of other 
religions, but by reason of what all hold in 
common. His very religious experience 
ought to bind him by the closest of ties to 
his fellow men. What is essential and 
vital in his religious experience is his trust 
in God, the personal commitment of his 
life to God, and the service of man which 
inevitably follows such consecration and 
service. This is what actually counts, and 
everything else, precious and important 
though it may be, is unessential, and not 
worth contending for. 

^* As a man thinketh in his heart, so is 
he." Heart faith, rather than the rea- 
soned conclusions of the intellect, hallowed 
though the latter may be by the many gen- 
erations of believers, is of supreme impor- 
tance. Does a man actually place before 
himself as his supreme Good, his ideal to- 
wards which his entire being aspires, 



88 Religion as a Personal Experience 

** Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever 
things are to be revered, whatsoever things 
are just, whatsoever things are lovely, 
whatsoever things are gracious"? It is 
this attitude of his entire moral being, and 
not the historic belief to which he professes 
to adhere, and not the symbols which he 
uses to express his worship, and not the 
ecclesiastical organization to which he be- 
longs that determines what he actually is, 
that determines whether or not he is a 
sincere member of the one holy church of 
God. 

We are living at a time when all 
churches, all religious bodies of every 
name, are being subjected to a searching 
test, are being tried ^^ so as by fire.'' Not 
the hostile world only, but their own most 
earnest spiritual members are testing them. 
In the light of what has been ascertained 
to be essential in religion, what is the real 
character of these churches? Are they 
simply societies of respectable persons of 
similar tastes and of kindred pursuits who 
come together to gratify their social in- 
stincts, or to help bolster up one another's 
religious opinions, or to minister to one 
another's emotional cravings, or to help 
merely to perpetuate the existence of a sect. 



JVorshiping and Working Together 89 

or even the existence of this present social 
order? Or are they organizations first of 
all to promote the spread of pure and un- 
defiled religion, the religion of personal 
experience, and thus spiritualize the 
whole of life? Do they seek primarily 
to perpetuate themselves, to fill up and 
strengthen their own ranks, or are they 
willing to lose their own life if thereby 
they may the more surely and the more 
speedily usher in the Kingdom of God? 

Are their services of worship calculated 
mainly to soothe and comfort those who 
participate in them, to make them feel 
better satisfied with themselves and with 
their fellow-worshipers, to make it easier 
for them to justify what they do out among 
their fellow men, or are they calculated 
to create within the hearts and minds of 
their worshipers a divine discontent with 
themselves and with what they are doing 
that is opposed to justice and human 
brotherhood? Is their principal object, 
or at least the principal end they attain, to 
provide aesthetic enjoyment, or to prove 
spiritually strengthening and uplifting? 

Are the churches centers not only of 
spiritual light, but also of spiritual power, 
communicating that power to all who come 



90 Religion as a Personal Experience 

in touch with them? Do they actually in- 
spire the worshiper to '* go out into all the 
world to preach the gospel to every crea- 
ture"? Do they exert even upon the 
more reluctant a kind of divine compul- 
sion to share with their fellows an experi- 
ence that glorifies their own lives? 

If this is what they actually accomplish 
in the community, we care not by what 
name they may be called, nor what their 
past history may have been, nor what 
claims they may urge or fail to urge ; they 
are indeed one and all branches of the 
Church Universal, the one Holy Church 
of the living God. They do not need to 
fear, for they will successfully meet every 
test that may be applied to them. They 
can not be supplanted. Their future is 
assured. 

For this is an age of specialization. 
Only those individuals and organizations 
that can not perform their work most ef- 
ficiently are supplanted. Everyone will 
admit that certain lines of work in which 
the Christian Churches were engaged in 
the past, and rightly engaged, have been 
taken up and carried on more successfully 
by other agencies. Such agencies are 
hospitals, asylums, organized charities, 



tVorshiping and Working Together 91 

benevolent societies, schools of all kinds, 
fraternal organizations without number. 
All these specialized organizations per- 
form their particular service to the com- 
munity to-day more efficiently than the 
churches can perform it. But the distinc- 
tive work of ministering to the religious 
life belongs to the churches as much as it 
ever did. They are the only organiza- 
tions which stand committed to just this 
work. In so far as they perform this 
work, are true to their distinctive mission, 
none of the hostile forces of the modern 
world can prevail against them. If we 
understand by the church organized re- 
ligion in all its various forms, we must 
claim that the church is certainly a divine 
institution. 

The church is a divine institution, but 
not an infallible institution. In her at- 
tempts to arbitrarily control the growing 
religious life of man she has made many 
and grievous mistakes in the past. Fal- 
lible men of authority in the church have 
presumed to place limitations upon the 
operation of the divine Spirit, and the 
Spirit has broken through all these arti- 
ficial restraints. Over and over again has 
the church needed to be reformed, and 



92 Religion as a Personal Experience 

again and again has she been reformed. 
But because of her unique mission she has 
endured through all the vicissitudes of the 
past, and will endure for all time. If re- 
ligion is what we claim that it is, not some- 
thing abnormal, not something that a man 
can live without, but rather the natural, 
normal fulfillment of life itself, life's blos- 
soming out into perfect beauty and sig- 
nificance, the church that ministers to this 
religious life, that fosters the development 
of this life, stands in no danger of being 
discredited and outgrown in the modern 
world. Changed in many respects, and 
adapted to modern conditions she must and 
will be; but so changed, so adapted, the 
church will continue to be what she has 
been in the past, the greatest and most 
highly valued of human institutions. 
Other institutions may serve the end of 
their existence, decline and utterly perish; 
the church will never decline and perish. 
Her work will never be completed, not 
even when human society shall have been 
transformed into the Kingdom of God, 
and all men have consciously become the 
children of God and brethren one of 
another. Her work will continue to be 
to help to minister to the religious life, to 



Worshiping and Working Together 93 

help to keep alive and strengthen the con- 
sciousness of divine fellowship and of hu- 
man brotherhood. 

To-day, and in all the days to come, the 
church as organized religion will continue 
to make use of all the instrumentalities 
that have been tried and have proved help- 
ful and even necessary for the successful 
prosecution of her work. She will con- 
tinue to avail herself of the noblest and 
most beautiful architecture, sculpture, and 
painting to adorn her houses of worship; 
of the noblest and most beautiful poetry 
and music to enrich her ritual of worship. 
She will study even more faithfully than in 
the past her Holy Bible, humanity's litera- 
ture of spiritual wisdom and power. 
Prayer and praise will fill her temples as 
in the most devotional age, but it will 
be a more intelligent prayer and a more 
appreciative praise. Her passion for 
righteousness will not be less than that of 
Israel's greatest prophets; it will be pro- 
founder and even more intense. Her 
whole-hearted devotion to truth will not 
be inferior to that of the foremost leaders 
of modern science. Her love and good- 
will will be the love and good-will of the 
Prophet of Nazareth. 



94 Religion as a Personal Experience 

Without such a church, without organ- 
ized religion, there can be no redemption 
of human society, no enduring brotherhood 
of man. Unless men worship together, 
share in the conscious fellowship of God, 
together ascribe supreme worth to their 
spiritual ideals, they will not long work 
together towards one divine end. When- 
ever perso.ns who are true brothers in 
spirit, loyal in their service to their fellow 
men, deny this, and themselves claim to re- 
ject all religion in the interests of humanity, 
they do not understand the language they 
employ. In so far as they are sincere, in 
so far as they are actual brothers, it Is not 
religion which they reject, but what in the 
past has too often been confused with re- 
ligion, and declared to be religion. What 
they reject is the undue emphasis the church 
has been wont to place upon ritual, polity 
and creed, and upon preparation for the 
world to come, and the too slight empha- 
sis she has placed upon Christlike human 
service here in this world. They can not 
and do not reject the religion of the great 
prophets and saints of all time, such as we 
are endeavoring to describe; they can not 
and do not reject the church as the spiritual 
body of men and women worshiping and 
working together because they have found 



JVorshiping and Working Together 95 

God for themselves, have committed their 
lives to Him and have begun to minister 
to others; they can not and do not reject 
a church which exists not for the aggran- 
dizement of a favored class, or of select 
individuals, but simply for the good of man. 
It is a long discipline, for the individual 
and for society, to bring man's feelings 
and thoughts and words and deeds Into 
abiding harmony with what man himself 
conceives to be truth, justice and good-will. 
It is indeed a long and tedious process to 
redeem human society from bondage to 
false and unworthy standards of values, 
from indifference to the high and holy in- 
terests of life, from all pettiness and nar- 
rowness of vision, from all selfish greed, 
from all lack of love. We do not claim 
for a moment that the Kingdom of God 
can come down out of heaven, out of the 
realm of the ideal, and be set up on earth 
in a day, or a year, or in the lifetime of 
any one of us. Over and over again must 
be done what seems to be the same pre- 
liminary work of education. Over and 
over again must men be taught how to find 
God and how to treat their brother man. 
** The word of the Lord was unto them 
precept upon precept, precept upon pre- 
cept, line upon line, line upon line, here a 



g6 Religion as a Personal Experience 

little and there a little." This, as Isaiah 
saw, is the divine method of education, of 
the education not of Israel only, but of the 
human race. Each lesson is a link in the 
chain, a step in the ascending stair, a page 
in the great book of life. The Master of 
Life will advance the pupil just as soon as 
he is ready for it. The lesson, however, 
must be learned at whatever cost, through 
struggle and failure and renewed struggle, 
for there is no other way. 

This is the task set the church in every 
age, the task of being the world's inspired 
and inspiring teacher of religion. Who 
can undertake such an exalted task? 
Only those who have experienced religion, 
only those who have found God for them- 
selves. The men and women of personal 
religion in all the churches can and will, 
humbly yet courageously and confidently, 
undertake this task. The vision has been 
vouchsafed to them, and they will not be 
disobedient; they have received the com- 
mand, and they will prove loyal to their 
** God-given best." All barriers between 
them of race and creed will be broken 
down, and together will they worship and 
together will they work for the redemp- 
tion of the world. 



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